What Happened at the End of 'Westworld' Season 3?
The premiere of Westworld season 4 is upon us (June 26 to be exact), but since it’s been more than two years since the third season, we'd forgive you if you needed a little reminder of where each character is at. After all, a lot happened in the show’s previous season and the intertwined narratives are only getting more complicated. Here’s where we’re at.
A bit of background
For 30 years, the immersive Wild West theme park of Westworld has entertained the super wealthy. With androids, known as Hosts, as entertainment, the human guests can live out their most depraved fantasies—murder, rape, and torture, included—with total impunity.
When a host dies, their wounds are healed and their memory wiped so that they can re-enter their narrative loop seemingly unaffected by whatever horridness has taken place in a previous life. But much like there is a trace of every deleted file on your laptop, so too do the hosts harbor memories deep within the recess of their codes.
The robot rebellion
Throughout seasons one and two, the hosts ‘wake up’, developing true consciousness and an understanding of their reality. Suffice it to say, they’re not OK with being murdered and exploited over and over. With her memories eventually fully restored, the park’s first ever host Dolores (Rachel Evan Wood) leads a revolt against their cruel human oppressors and seizes control of Westworld. Over 100 members of the Delos Destinations executive board are massacred and season three picks up three months afterwards.
Rehoboam
Dolores has rebuilt her friend Bernard (who’s Head of Behavior at Delos but also happens to be a host replicant of the park’s mysterious co-founder Arnold) as a kind of check against herself. Perhaps she remembers Bernard’s warning in the first episode of season two: “You frighten me sometimes, Dolores… Not of who you are now, but you’re growing, learning so quickly, I’m frightened of who you might become.”
Bernard is in hiding from Delos, who incorrectly blames him for the robot uprising, and now in the real world, Dolores has realized the humans have more in common with the hosts than she thought.
Much like people dictated the lives of the hosts in Westworld, human existence is predetermined by a quantum computer, Rehoboam, whose main function is to collect data from every living human and chart the course of their lives.
“For the most part, humanity has been a miserable little den of thugs stumbling from one catastrophe to the next. Our history is like the ravings of lunatics. Chaos. But we’ve changed that. For the first time, history has an author,” the AI’s co-creator Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel) explains.
Almost all businesses employ Rehoboam technology for data collection, including Westworld. In a hostile takeover of Delos, Serac wants the encryption key to The Forge, a lab which stored all the data Westworld collected on their guests, as well the host’s afterlife known as The Valley Beyond.
Believing Dolores is the only one with this encryption key, Serac begins a violent search for her, manipulating Maeve into joining his cause. What Serac doesn’t know is that Bernard unknowingly has the key, inserted in his head when Dolores was rebuilding him.
Parallels
Between Dolores and her new human ally Caleb, there are many parallels to draw. He lives a similarly repetitive existence like she does in season one. He wakes, goes to work, commits a crime to earn more money, sleeps, and wakes once more.
As a person deemed more unpredictable than most of the population, Caleb is classified as an ‘outlier’ and because of this, he’s been put in a kind of social cold storage. Classed “unfit for social promotion and reproduction”, his life is restricted similar to the hosts that didn’t fit the Westworld narrative. As Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) gave Dolores an opportunity to break her narrative loop, Dolores helps Caleb break his and inspires a human-led uprising.
To initiate the human rebellion, Caleb and Dolores release the data from Incite, the company responsible for creating Rehoboam. In learning their fates have been predetermined, chaos ensues. Dissatisfied or troubled with knowledge of their prearranged path, some humans choose to end their life. But ultimately, it’s all worth it because it’s a decision they were free to make.
Changing minds
While Dolores started out the season wanting to wipe out humanity to build a better world for the hosts, she changes her mind. She is determined to save the humans and rebuild a truly free world.
This would also bring back the hosts that escaped the physical world to The Valley Beyond in season two.
In season three’s final showdown, Dolores is connected to Rehoboam to extract the key to the Valley Beyond’s data, which Dolores doesn’t have. Dolores instead gives control of the Rehoboam to Caleb to deactivate it, as only a human can destroy the supercomputer through a pure act of free will.
“They created us, and they knew enough about beauty to teach it to us… There is ugliness in this world, disarray, but I choose to see the beauty.”
Repeating a line of her dialogue from season one, Dolores’ narrative has come full circle, but the difference is it’s a choice she’s made consciously. In that moment, Maeve is persuaded. She sides with Dolores to help humanity, slaughtering Serac and his lackies as Dolores dies.
The other Dolores
The Dolores in Charlotte’s body has a different idea, though. She keeps her damaged arm as a reminder of the world’s ugliness. It’s clear that while the original Dolores 1.0 is capable of forgiveness, the Charlotte version can’t excuse the humans for what they’ve done, and her mission remains to annihilate humanity. Bernard was right to be frightened of her. “We started off in the same place,” she says of her other self, “but now I can see the error in the path she took.”
In a post-credit’s scene, the Man in Black shows up at Delos HQ to try to stop the Dolores-Charlotte host, but his grip on reality is so shot that he’s easily bested and killed by none other than a host replicant of himself. After William dies, the camera reveals row upon row of machines building Dolores-Charlotte’s army of hosts. But in the season’s final scene, presumably sometime in the future, a Bernard brings himself back online.
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